How To Make Beaded Ear Wires

Hi there. In this video I am going to show you how quick and easy it is to make your own custom beaded pair of ear wires.

So the great thing about making your own jewelry is that you can customize things and make them exactly the way you want, and these earrings are just one example. Now to make these earrings with beads, all you need is a piece of wire and some beads. But you will need a few tools. Here I have a cup bur, you could also use a file, wire cutters, chain nose pliers, round nose pliers, bail making pliers with a 10 millimeter mandrel, and if you don't have that you could also use the barrel of a sharpie marker, and nylon jaw pliers.

Now to make a plain pair of earrings, all you need is a four inch piece of 20 gauge wire. Preferably half hard wire so it will hold its shape. But if you use dead soft wire, you can harden it afterwards. And then you want to use your nylon jaw pliers and straighten out your wire before you work with it, which I've already done here. Next we're just going to meet those ends together and then fold it in half. And I like to take the nylon jaw pliers and just finish that fold. This way, holding them side by side, we make two matching pair.

Now for a regular pair of earrings, you would need a four-inch piece of wire. So when you are cutting a piece of wire to make your beaded earrings, you just need to add in two times the width of your beads. So these are four millimeter stardust beads from House of Gems. So I added another eight millimeters, or about three-eights of an inch to my wire. Now it's tricky when you're folding it in half to get it perfectly in half, and that's fine. You can see these ends aren't perfectly in half. So I'm just going to take my flush cutters and cut them now, and that way we have two flush cuts, and they're also both at the same length.

Next, I'm going to take my 10 millimeter barrel of my bail making pliers, and put that a little bit closer to the cut ends than the folded end about...here it is centered. I'm going to move it down about the length of my bead, about four millimeters to allow that extra space up here. And then you just wrap your wire around that barrel. And that makes the shape of the top of your ear wires.

Next, take your chain nose pliers, grasp them so that they're about a quarter of an inch from an end and just give it a slight bend. That's that bend that you see in ear wires. It makes it a little easier to insert them in to your ears. Now, if you were making a lot of ear wires you could just make them to this point and leave them together in pairs. And then when you're ready to make your earrings, you just snip them apart, and that way you know you have matching pairs. So, I'm going to snip them apart here. Just snip off that little bend and then slide on my bead. And next, take the round nose pliers and make a loop. So that, of course, you can hang your earring from these ear wires. And then grab that side and bend it back so the loop is centered under the bead.

And now for our final step, we're going to give this a little bend. I always wait to do this until I have this part done because it's hard to get it accurate. I'm just going to bend this right along this bead like that, and that way I have it in exactly the right spot. And then the final step is to take your cup bur and make sure that this bit that goes into the ear is nice and smooth. There's little diamond bits inside here, so you want to make sure to make that nice and smooth so that it doesn't hurt anybody's ears it goes in.

And there it is. It's that simple to make yourself a custom pair of beaded ear wires. Happy creating.